FEB to Christina, Christy, and Diana - Tape nib part 2

This one needed better confetti - but I was still traumatized from the nib debacle on the teal envelopes which you have not seen yet.

These two are redundant - but, I'll just leave them in as I proceed to my learning experience.

I had teal envelopes and I had done about 30 first names with my Tape nib and figured I should take a break. So, I carefully cleaned the nib and took a break. When I came back to do some more - the nib would not work. I have no idea what was going on - and I was in a near panic. I knew the envelopes had been ordered - re-ordering was not an option. Telling my brother and sister-in-law that I had run into a problem was not an option. I had to figure something out.

Eventually, I just took the reservoir off the nib and that meant that I had to dip the nib on EVERY SINGLE STROKE. Unless you have addressed envelopes with a dip pen - there is no way to fathom how tedious it is to dip EVERY SINGLE STROKE. Of course, there were times I would forget. If you look at the N in Cervantes - you can see that I forgot to dip on the second stroke. Now look at the second E in Cervantes. Even the little top loop, which I do second, should have been dipped.

I was so relieved to have figured out a work around that I was not even annoyed at having to dip on every stroke. As I already said - it was a learning experience. And to be perfectly clear - it's not that I will never use the Tape nibs again. It wasn't the endless dipping - if that had truly bothered me - I would not have chosen to do it on the 20 envelopes for the exchange. 

The learning experience is to never take on a project where there is not a backup plan for things going wrong. And never never never offer to do an actual set of envelopes for an actual event using anything other than markers for which there is easy access to more of them - should the ones on hand run out of ink.

I learned that lesson during an ice storm in December when the envelopes were sucking the ink out of metallic Sharpies at an alarming rate. You can't always find the gold or silver Sharpies in December. I suppose you could if you were willing to drive around for a few hours....